Howard Cooper owned a Honda dealership in Ann Arbor, Mich. for 47 years. He sold it in April to another family-owned company, with the stipulations that all of his employees got to to keep their jobs. WHAT A GOOD GUY, REALLY. That is a thing that good people do, and he’s a good person. BRAVO.

BUT THERE’S MORE.

This week, as he transitions out of his job at the company, he gave each of his 89 employees a bonus check—$1,000 for each year they’d worked for the company. There were people who had been there 20 years and more, meaning he wrote some checks for $20,000 and more.. Part of me feels like, wait, if he’s rich enough that he can write all these checks… maybe he should have been paying people more in the first place? But then like, no, ha. That is not how things works. Bosses make the money, bosses keep the money. Good on this one boss for sharing the wealth though. Nice man.

My husband started working for a medium sized programming company out of college and it was sold a few years back to a corporate giant. The owner gave everybody checks–my husband had only been working there for 2 years but got several thousand dollars. A secretary who had been working there since it was just, like, 3 of them cried when she opened hers. Theoretically all of the money came from what he got for the buyout, so he couldn’t have just been paying them more the whole time.